User:Albill
[edit] Al Jigen Billings
Residence: Oakland, California, USA.
Web Links
I'm a professional tech guy and work as a QA Engineer in the Bay Area of California. I work for the Mozilla Corporation. MoCo, along with the larger open source Mozilla Community, is the proud creator of the Firefox web browser.
Previously, I worked at Microsoft for nine years doing QA work and customer facing work with feedback and blogs as a project manager for the Internet Explorer team. All of my professional experience in technology has been in the space of the Internet, browsers, and online community work. I worked on Internet Explorer 4, 5, 6 SP2, and 7 (with a stint working on MSN Explorer).
I've been on the Internet since back in 1989 when we had to hack into a local dial-up at the University and work out from there through telnet via intermediate university unix boxes. I once ran a UUCP node, pagan.UUCP, back in the golden days, in order to get Usenet and e-mail. I ran two different Seattle area modem-based bulletin board systems in the late 80's and early 90's: Revelstone and The Sacred Grove.
I have an interdisciplinary Master of Art's degree in Humanities from California State University, Dominguez Hills. My concentration was Philosophy, specifically in the space of Philosophy of Religion. My thesis focused on the late 19th century "Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn" and its beliefs and teachings concerning the nature and structure of the human soul.
After receiving my MA, I joined the Five Mountain Buddhist Seminary, a non-denominational Mahayana Buddhist seminary, from which I recently graduated. I now teach a number of classes within it. I am a Buddhist practitioner with a background in Tibetan Vajrayana and other forms of Mahayana Buddhism with connections to both Japanese Tendai and Korean Zen (Sŏn). I am an ordained priest within the Five Mountain Sangha, a modern order in the Korean Sŏn lineage of Zen Master Sŭngsan (Seung Sahn). My ordained name in Japanese is “Jigen,” meaning “Eye of Compassion.” In Korean, it is “Jăan” and is written in Chinese characters as “慈眼”. For reasons of history, I go by "Jigen" when functioning as a priest. Our school follows the model of "lay priest" common in Japan and with some Korean orders so I am a householder, not a celibate monastic. I live in the world, just like everyone else, and deal with the same problems and struggles.
I am on the board of directors of two small religious non-profits. One is the Buddhist temple with which I am affiliated and the other is a Neopagan one in Utah started by my mother, which focuses on chaplaincy and care-giving work for Neopagans, especially those who are incarcerated.
I am also the president and on the board of Ace Monster Toys, a hackerspace established in 2010 in Oakland, California. We are a California a non-profit organization applying for 501(c)(3) status federally. When not engaged in various Buddhist things or my work, much of my time is spent focusing on Ace Monster Toys during the week.
I live in the Oakland, California with my wife, R, to whom I was married in 2004. I have a fifteen year old daughter from my previous marriage who lives in Seattle with her mother.
